Ripple Announces New ‘MoneyTap’ App for Instant Domestic Payments in Japan
San Francisco-based blockchain status Ripple, since its inception, has always worked in coordination with global banks and other financial service providers. Ripple works for providing blockchain-based solutions to these institutions to enable instant cross-borders payments at very low costs.
Taking a step further, the digital payments company is now working with the Japan Bank Consortium - a group of 61 Japanese banks for creating a new smartphone application called the “MoneyTap”. The applications will be powered by the blockchain technology and will facilitate instant settlement of domestic payments, any time of the day and for all seven days of the week.
As per the official announcement made by Ripple, MoneyTap is the first-of-its-kind mobile app which will be developed and used by several banking firms in Japan. Initially, three major members of the consortium: Resona Bank, Suruga Bank and SBI Net Sumishin Bank will go live with the app by the autumn of 2018. Later, other banks of the consortium will be adopting it.
This is certainly not the first experience of the blockchain startup Ripple to work in coordination with banks. In fact, in the past few months, Ripple has been seen partnering with several banking institutions across Asia, Europe, and also Middle East to provide its blockchain-based solutions.
Also, Japan is considered to be the most crypto-friendly nation which has encouraged the growth of digital currencies and its underpinning blockchain technology. Also, with the existing available infrastructure, banks provide a very limited flexibility with domestic payments in the country. Transactions usually take place in just a pre-defined time period between 8:30 am and 3:30 pm on weekdays.
Having seen the potential of the blockchain technology, the banks are now willing to change this scenario and make the money transfer facility available to all at any time of the day, for 365 days.
Takashi Okita, CEO of SBI Ripple Asia, said that the new MoneyTap app will provide “faster, safer and more efficient” payments. He further added that “We are proud to leverage Ripple’s blockchain technology through our new mobile app, MoneyTap, to improve the payments infrastructure in Japan.”
“Together with the trust, reliability and reach of the bank consortium, we can remove friction from payments and create a faster, safer, and more efficient domestic payments experience for our customers.”
The use of MoneyTap will be extremely customer-friendly and will allow all the customers of the bank consortium to make instant domestic payments by using either of the three: phone number, QR code, bank account.
While commenting on this new development, Emi Yoshikawa, director of joint venture partnerships at Ripple, said: “The release of the MoneyTap mobile app shows Ripple’s continued commitment to provide its partners across Asia and the world with blockchain-powered solutions that dramatically improve the customer payments journey. We’re proud to provide this production-ready technology that not only improves the international payments experience, but also have applications for domestic payments infrastructure.”